Look at Mr. Fancypants! Let's all laugh at him for wearing fancy pants! Did your good friend blind governor David Paterson pick out those pants? Joe Scarborough is a jerk.

Between Chris Matthews never ever letting Capehart finish a sentence to Dylan Ratigan playing footage of him eating a bagel in order to mock him (leading to an embarrassing call from Capehart's mom), everyone at MSNBC is always making fun of Jonathan Capehart.

Poor Capehart has said he still thinks of himself as "that geeky little kid from New Jersey who had a giant head and enormous glasses to match" so we can only assume that he is just used to all this bullying by the asshole-ish alpha males who make up almost the entirety of MSNBC's lineup.

But you don't have to take it, Jon! Stand up for yourself! Or just get off cable news, where "smart and quietly well-spoken" is not really welcome.

INT. THE "GLO LOUNGE" IN FIRE ISLAND PINES
The lounge is a new construction with fresh wood encasing a modern-look bar with ample seating and tables, with large open windows that overlook the bay. The event known as "High Tea" is just beginning and the crowd is starting to grow. Near one window, sitting on a sofa are RAYBANTWINK and PRADATWINK, wearing of-the-season sunglasses as befit their names. As the crowd enters from the stairwell to their right they look around the room.

PRADATWINK nods and winks as he finishes his drink. RAYBANTWINK gets up to leave for the bar. One sofa over at another window, IRONICTEEBEAR is caressing the sofa with SLEEVELESSBEAR.

EMACIGAYTED is speaking loudly into a black RAZR phone and approaches the sofa holding the BEARS and walks past to lean out the window.

EMACIGAYTED walks away from the BEARS, cigarette in the hand that is covering his ear. He leaves for the main High Tea bar to the left, passing RAYBANTWINK, carrying two drinks.

Handbags are the engine that drives luxury brands today. According to annual consumer surveys conducted by Coach each year, the average American woman purchased two new handbags a year in 2000; by 2004, that number was more than four. At Louis Vuitton's immense four-floor global store in Tokyo, 40 percent of all sales are made in the first room, which sells only monogram handbags, wallets, and other small leather goods.

"With the bag... there are no leftovers because there are no sizes, unlike shoes or clothes," Miuccia Prada told me. "It's easier to choose a bag than a dress because you don't have to face the age, the weight, all the problems. And there is a kind of an obsession with bags. It's so easy to make money. The bag is the miracle of the company.

In 2004, luxury brands collectively sold $11.7 billion worth of handbags and other leather accessories, and the segment is only getting stronger. While the luxury market grew by 1.2 percent each year from 2001 and 2004, leather goods sales increased by 7.5 percent each year. A large share of those sales are "It" bags: the latest hot designs that—thanks to luxury brand campaigns and fashion magazine articles—become the must-have of the season.

[...]

And women got hooked, some disturbingly so. As I noted in the Introduction, there are Japanese girls who work as prostitutes to buy Louis Vuitton, Chanel, and Hermes bags. I read about a woman who played backgammon for Hermes bags. In September 2005, victims of Hurricane Katrina used their Red Cross cards to buy $800 bags at the Louis Vuitton boutique in Atlanta. (Once the story hit the papers, Louis Vuitton executives instructed their salespeople to stop accepting Red Cross cards for payment and reimbursed the Red Cross for purchases already made.) Web sites such as BagBorroworSteal.com have cropped up for women to rent luxury and designer handbags for a fashionably short period of time instead of buying them—that way they can change their bags more often.

[...]

To see how an Hermes bag is made is to understand what luxury once was and what it is no longer. On a cool spring morning in March 2005, I visited the Hermes special orders workshop in Pantin, a seedy suburb north of Paris, to get a glimpse.

[...]

The artisans in the Pantin workshop dress in aprons and white coats. Some wear earphones to listen to music on their iPods while they work. The workshop is perfectly silent except for the occasional tapping of a hammer or the short burst of stitching on a sewing machine. No one speaks. They just build bags. Even with a lot of practice, making an Hermes bag goes slowly. It takes fifteen to sixteen hours to make an average-size Birkin or Kelly. The bigger bags take twenty-five to thirty hours. In 2005, Hermes twelve leather ateliers in France produced 130,000 handbags. Thanks to the waiting lists, Hermes didn't suffer losses after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, which caused one of the worst retail years in recent memory. In fact, sales went up. "After September 11, a lot of people came in to buy that one special scarf or tie or bag," Robert Chavez, CEO of Hermes's American subsidiary in New York, told me. "They'd say, 'I just want to have one special thing.'"

INT. A LONG ISLAND RAILROAD CAR, EAST-BOUND
The afternoon train is crowded, with a mix of those leaving Manhattan after a long day of work and those that are beach-bound. The commuters read papers and magazines, sleep, and talk quietly amongst themselves, but one voice rises above them. GREENTWINK talks on a cell phone and sits on the window side of a pair of seats with YELLOWTWINK. Both are wearing what appear to be freshly pressed Izod shirts in the colors of their names. Both wear over-sized sunglasses with lenses that coyly reveal the movements of the eyes concealed within.

YELLOWTWINK looks up as SALMONTWINK passes in the aisle. He wears a salmon-color deep-vee American Apparel tee shirt. After SALMONTWINK passes, YELLOWTWINK wrinkles his nose, making a "what's that smell" face.

BOTH leave their seats to stand near the door as the train pulls into a station.

From a distance, GREENTWINK can be heard speaking over the announcement.

I like books as much as the next person. I even, at times, appreciate art and enjoyed the Met as much as one can with a monumental hangover on a Thursday afternoon. But seriously, the point of spending five thousand dollars on a book cloaked in Prada is completely lost on me, as is the importance of socialites and most wealthy people. So when I get an email for a last-minute Party Crash at the Prada store in Soho, my inability to say no combined with my penchant for mocking rich, obnoxious assholes wearing God-knows-what found me at the Prada Epicenter.

After making a series of huge mistakes (failing to wash the conditioner out of my hair; picking the one F Train car that was leaking black junk, and failing to notice said junk until it was on my white jacket; getting married for love, not money, and getting royally screwed in my subsequent divorce), I found myself walking thorough the doors of the pointlessly cavernous space that houses millions of dollars of overpriced clothing, handbags, and accessories, adored by upper-middle class schoolgirls and their mothers alike. I understand the sparseness in the store's design is supposed to complement, not detract from that of the product. But really — REALLY — does a store need a case of stairs that is larger than a set of high school bleachers to sell fucking handbags? Furthermore, those stairs are over a foot-and-a-half wide and a total pain in the ass to walk down. You know how hard it is to get sufficiently drunk and not fall up — or down — those stairs? Pretty goddamned hard, I can tell you that.

After I get my hands on this list of supposed "important guests", we're assigned this gorgeous spotter, Rich, and this kid has us running up and down those goddamned stairs, trying to track down people to photograph. I am freaking out because I have no idea who anyone is and, honestly, I'm not skinny enough to be here. At one point, Nikola and I are separated — I'm downstairs at the bar (natch), he's upstairs. All of a sudden, my friend Mo spots Helena Christensen and taps me on the shoulder saying, "Hey, um, isn't that um, a model or something?" Without responding, I haul my ass (in four-inch heels, might I add) up those fucking stairs as fast as humanly possible to find Nikola, to tell him that Hey! I can contribute SOMETHING TO THIS SHOOT BECAUSE I FOUND HELENA FUCKING CHRISTENSEN!

I find him at the top of the stairs, with Rich, in all of his flash-slutbox-glory. I breathlessly inform him that she's downstairs. They both look at me, rather dismissively, and reply that yeah, they know. They already got her.

Motherfucker.

I was too stressed out about how I looked, how other people thought I looked, to have fun. I should have been wasted, like I was at the party for the last book Malcolm Gladwell wrote an intro for, but those stairs and the wait for the bar saved me (?) from such a condition. And what was this party for, anyhow? Prada? A book about art about Prada? A reason for a bunch of people to throw a bunch of money around for a book about art about Prada to support an artist who makes sculptures of Happy Meals on Tiffany platters? Like I said, all that artistic bullshit is lost on me. But the photos, well, they're pretty. (Like always.)

Tom Sachs Book Launch @ Prada Epicenter [Photos]

More painful than the sartorial loss, however, is the clear damage to the $40 million retail space itself. You just can't expect ostentatious design to bounce back from a hit like this.

A moment of silence, please, for the Brazilian zebrawood floor. The floorboards will be laying in wake at Rem Koolhaas' apartment through Wednesday.

Fire Sale [Verbose Coma]